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Dinosaur in a wind tunnel tests feathered flight

MAURICE is blue. It weighs half a kilogram, has a 60-centimetre wingspan and is made of balsa wood and aluminium. Best of all, its wings have removable feathers, taken from a mallard duck.

Maurice is the first life-size, anatomically correct model of a microraptor – a predatory dinosaur that lived around 120 million years ago. Last year, it took to the air, suspended in a wind tunnel to test theories about how bird flight evolved.

Microraptors were small dinosaurs that had large feathers on their four limbs. Since their discovery in 2003, scientists have debated how they used their feathered legs. Were they splayed parallel to the arms to form a second pair of wings? Or were the feathers just decorative?

To find out, Gareth Dyke at the University of Southampton in the UK and his colleagues built Maurice. The wind tunnel results suggest microraptors would have been most stable in a slow glide. This suggests they combined tree- and ground-based foraging by scampering up trunks and gliding between trees, like a modern-day flying squirrel, says Dyke (Nature Communications, doi.org/nwf).

And the removable feathers? They made no difference. “The most important thing for this dinosaur was maximising wing surface rather than the presence of feathers,” says Dyke. “That’s key. For years, scientists thought feathers were unique to birds as a great adaption for generating flight. But it seems almost 100 per cent certain that feathers evolved for something else. We just have to figure out what.”